ABSTRACT
Moral treatment became the standard approach to mental illness throughout the nineteenth and fi rst half of the twentieth century, a time in which new treatments were being developed. One of them was convulsive therapy. In 1927, Austrian psychiatrist Manfred Sakel used insulin to induce coma in patients as a result of hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) in their brains. Th is treatment showed a good short-term eff ect in patients with severe mental illness, once patients had recovered from the hypoglycemia. Th is treatment, however, carried signifi cant risk and was gradually replaced by electroconvulsive therapy. Before the development of electroconvulsive therapy, in 1934,
Hungarian psychiatrist Ladislas Meduna proposed the use of a chemical called cardiazol to induce seizures in patients with severe mental conditions. Inspired by insulin shock therapy and cardiazol shock therapy, Italian neurologist Ugo Cerletti proposed instead the use of short-term electric current to induce convulsions aft er seeing signifi cant improvement in a patient with delusions and hallucinations who returned to a normal state of mind in 1938. Th is new electroshock or electroconvulsive therapy was more practical and easy to apply and replaced chemical shock therapies.
